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Joseff Bailey-Wood
Last activity about 9 hours ago

Quina hora és?

Hi! I'm Joseff and along with being a student in chemical engineering, one of my great passions is language-learning. I learnt something really cool recently about Catalan (a romance language closely related to Valencian that's spoken in Andorra, Catalonia, and parts of Spain) — and that is how speakers tell the time.

While most European languages stick to the standard minutes-past / minutes-to between hours, Catalan does something really quite special, with a focus on the quarters (quarts [ˈkwarts]). To see what I mean, take a look at this clock made by Penguin___Lover on Instructables :

If you want to tell the time in Catalan, you should refer to the following hour (the one that's still to come), and how many minutes have passed or will pass for the closest quarter (sometimes half-quarter / mig quart [ˈmit͡ʃ kwart]) — clear as mud? It's definitely one of the more difficult things to wrap your head around as a learner. But fear not, with the power of MATLAB, we'll understand in no time!

To make a tool to tell the time in Catalan, the first thing we need to do is extract the current time into its individual hours, minutes and seconds*

function catalanTime = quinahora()
    % Get the current time
    [hours, minutes, seconds] = hms(datetime("now"));
    
    % Adjust hours to 12-hour format
    catalanHour = mod(hours-1, 12)+1;
    nextHour = mod(hours, 12)+1;

Then to defining the numbers in catalan. It's worth noting that because the hours are feminine and the minutes are masculine, the words for 1 and 2 is different too (this is not too weird as languages go, in fact for my native Welsh there's a similar pattern between 2 and 4).

    % Define the numbers in Catalan
    catNumbers.masc = ["un", "dos", "tres", "quatre", "cinc"];
    catNumbers.fem = ["una", "dues", "tres", "quatre",...
                  "cinc", "sis", "set", "vuit",...
                  "nou", "deu", "onze", "dotze"];

Okay, now it's starting to get serious! I mentioned before that this traditional time telling system is centred around the quarters — and that is true, but you'll also hear about the mig de quart (half of a quarter) * which is why we needed that seconds' precision from earlier!

    % Define 07:30 intervals around the clock from 0 to 60
    timeMarks = 0:15/2:60;
    timeFraction = minutes + seconds / 60; % get the current position
    [~, idx] = min(abs(timeFraction - timeMarks)); % extract the closest timeMark
    mins = round(timeFraction - timeMarks(idx)); % round to the minute

After getting the fraction of the hour that we'll use later to tell the time, we can look into how many minutes it differs from that set time, using menys (less than) and i (on top of). There's also a bit of an AM/PM distinction, so you can use this function and know whether it's morning or night!

    % Determine the minute string (diffString logic)
    diffString = '';
    if mins < 0
        diffString = sprintf(' menys %s', catNumbers.masc(abs(mins)));
    elseif mins > 0
        diffString = sprintf(' i %s', catNumbers.masc(abs(mins)));
    end
    
    % Determine the part of the day (partofDay logic)
    if hours < 12
        partofDay = 'del matí'; % Morning (matí)
    elseif hours < 18
        partofDay = 'de la tarda'; % Afternoon (tarda)
    elseif hours < 21
        partofDay = 'del vespre'; % Evening (vespre)
    else
        partofDay = 'de la nit'; % Night (nit)
    end
    
    % Determine 'en punt' (o'clock exactly) based on minutes
    enPunt = '';
    if mins == 0
        enPunt = ' en punt';
    end

Now all that's left to do is define the main part of the string, which is which mig quart we are in. Since we extracted the index idx earlier as the closest timeMark, it's just a matter of indexing into this after the strings have been defined.

    % Create the time labels
    labels = {sprintf('són les %s%s%s %s', catNumbers.fem(catalanHour), diffString, enPunt, partofDay), ...
              sprintf('és mig quart de %s%s %s', catNumbers.fem(nextHour), diffString, partofDay), ...
              sprintf('és un quart de %s%s %s', catNumbers.fem(nextHour), diffString, partofDay), ...
              sprintf('és un quart i mig de %s%s %s', catNumbers.fem(nextHour), diffString, partofDay), ...
              sprintf('són dos quarts de %s%s %s', catNumbers.fem(nextHour), diffString, partofDay), ...
              sprintf('són dos quarts i mig de %s%s %s', catNumbers.fem(nextHour), diffString, partofDay), ...
              sprintf('són tres quarts de %s%s %s', catNumbers.fem(nextHour), diffString, partofDay), ...
              sprintf('són tres quarts i mig de %s%s %s', catNumbers.fem(nextHour), diffString, partofDay), ...
              sprintf('són les %s%s%s %s', catNumbers.fem(nextHour), diffString, enPunt, partofDay)};
    
    catalanTime = labels{idx};

Then we need to do some clean up — the definite article les / la and the preposition de don't play nice with un and the initial vowel in onze, so there's a little replacement lookup here.

    % List of old and new substrings for replacement
    oldStrings = {'les un', 'són la una', 'de una', 'de onze'};
    newStrings = {'la una', 'és la una', 'd''una', 'd''onze'};
    % Apply replacements using a loop
    for i = 1:length(oldStrings)
        catalanTime = strrep(catalanTime, oldStrings{i}, newStrings{i});
    end
end
quinahora()
ans = 'és un quart i mig de nou menys tres del vespre'

So, can you work out what time it was when I made this post? 🤔

And how do you tell the time in your language?

Fins després!

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